2025/11/01 by Kostantinos Mattas, António Lucas, Mattas, Kostantinos +9
Engineering · #Autonomous Vehicle Technology and Safety #Computers and Society (cs.CY) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC) #Robotics (cs.RO) #Traffic and Road Safety #Traffic control and management
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2512.13694
openalex publication_date 2025/11/01 · openalex created_date 2025/12/18 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
For decades, car following and traffic flow models have assumed that drivers default driving strategy is to maintain a safe distance. Several previous studies have questioned whether the Driving to Keep Distance is a traffic invariant. Therefore, the acceleration deceleration torque asymmetry of drivers must necessarily determine the observed patterns of traffic oscillations. Those studies indicate that drivers can adopt alternative CF strategies, such as Driving to Keep Inertia, by following basic instructions. The present work extends the evidence from previous research by showing the effectiveness of a DI course that immediately translates into practice on a closed circuit. Twelve drivers were invited to follow a lead car that varied its speed on a real circuit. Then, the driver took a DI course and returned to the same real car following scenario. Drivers generally adopted DD as the default CF mode in the pretest, both in field and simulated PC conditions, yielding very similar results. After taking the full DI course, drivers showed significantly less acceleration, deceleration, and speed variability than did the pretest, both in the field and in the simulated conditions, which indicates that drivers adopted the DI strategy. This study is the first to show the potential of adopting a DI strategy in a real circuit.